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In an Easter Dress, a Social Set Revealed St. Louis By GUY TREBAY Published: March 18, 2007

Stephanie S. Cordle for The New York Times EXCLUSIVE The cherry dress, the signature outfit of the St. Louis Woman's Exchange, is still going strong.

WE accept by now that designer collections will whip in and out of style with the aerodynamic thrust of a race car running a lap at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. We understand that obsolescence is built in. We may wish at times that things were otherwise; sadly, they aren't. And so, thanks in part to this dispiriting truth of the market, spirits may brighten when we come across a rare item whose existence rebukes the cult of novelty, some fine and simple product that seems never to change. Who can say when the cherry dress came into being? People here can tell you only that it was always there. For 50 years the cherry dress has been the holiday uniform for the fine-featured towheads at places like the St. Louis Country Club or exclusive Midwestern summer resorts like Harbor Point or Charlevoix, Mich. For 50 years, the cherry dress has been a consistent best seller at the Woman's Exchange of St. Louis, a modest nonprofit shop and institution itself about as old as electrification, having opened its doors in 1883. Come Easter, orders at the store are so strong for cherry dresses that Ellie Dressel, who sews them, says her leg is "chained to the sewing machine." Ms. Dressel, a divorced mother who has supported a family and reared a mentally challenged son at home by sewing this one item (450 dresses a year, she said) for nearly a quarter-century, epitomizes the Horatio Alger principles behind the Woman's Exchange, which a 19th-century newspaper described as "helping those who try to help themselves." In classic form, the cherry dress is a simple box-pleat frock in white cotton, with a piped Peter Pan collar, a snap closure and four paired cotton cherries, in sewing terminology called yo-yos, stitched on the front.

Palm Beach Magazine Jacqueline Kennedy put her son in the boy's version.

There are many variants, including a short-pants boy's version. A snapshot exists of John F. Kennedy Jr. as a toddler, wearing a cherry jumper from the St. Louis Woman's Exchange to accompany his mother to St. Edward Church in Palm Beach, Fla. It is the sort of picture, said Nancy Thomas, the president of the shop's volunteer board, that has caused at least one St. Louis man (her husband) to express relief that he never had sons. WHAT is it about the cherry dress, one may ask? What was it about any of the simple preppy staples that turned into classics, things like penny loafers or blue blazers or button-down shirts? They functioned so well that people forgot to change them. They were so stylistically generic that, for a very long while, they escaped the tentacles of fashion. They were so reassuringly dowdy that they became background, no small point in a world where people still think that it is one who wears clothes and not the other way around. And they were durable. "There's a timeless quality to them, and they're dresses that you hold on to," Carrie Polk, one of four sisters with deep family roots in this river city, said of cherry dresses. "Three generations in our family have worn them. They're like clothes from before the disposable-clothes era, with hems the size of Texas. You didn't just spill chocolate on one and pitch it. You got it cleaned and ironed, and if you grew, you brought down the hem."

Stephanie S. Cordle for The New York Times HOME INDUSTRY The goods have not changed much at the St. Louis exchange.

A kiddie garment may seem a flimsy thing on which to hang a social history, but the cherry dress is sold in only one place in the world, and that place itself is a historical rarity, perhaps the largest among the remaining outposts of a once-thriving national network of nonprofit "exchanges" for women's work. Of scores that existed at the height of the movement, there are now about 20 left, including outposts in Memphis, St. Augustine, Fla., and Brooklyn. The women's exchanges, voluntary social service agencies, originated in 19th-century Philadelphia as places for genteel ladies fallen on hard times to discreetly earn a living without leaving home. "Consignors were originally known as decayed gentlewomen," said the historian Kathleen Sander, whose book, "The Business of Charity: The Woman's Exchange Movement, 1832-1900," traced the history of a social service federation whose feminist outlines were not always easy to detect behind the chintz-upholstered gentility of the exchanges themselves. Well into the 20th century, society women operated these tearooms and gift shops that sold everything from hand-painted china or smocked christening bonnets to knitted sweaters for dogs. It was the Civil War that propelled the woman's exchange movement, by depleting an entire marriageable generation of men, and forcing women of all economic backgrounds to leave home and forge careers. The percentage of unmarried women in the post-bellum period, Ms. Sander noted, was higher then than at any other time in American history. "The exchanges grew out of this tremendous economic insecurity," she said. That and a flourishing Decorative Arts movement — introduced to the country at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia — helped revive skills largely lost to mass production. "There were wonderful skills that had fallen through the cracks," Ms. Sander said. Marketing those skills became the mission of dozens of similar white-glove enterprises across the country, and helped keep the exchanges alive through the Great Depression and two World Wars. For reasons lost to time, each exchange tended to develop its own particular products. The shuttered and much-lamented New York Exchange for Women's Work — started in 1878 by Candace Wheeler, an interior designer, and Mary Atwater Choate, a prominent New Yorker who also founded the preparatory school now known as Choate Rosemary Hall — made a specialty of smock dresses, bittersweet chocolate cakes and cod balls. (The exchange fell victim in 2003 to soaring real estate prices.) The Baltimore exchange became renowned for sock monkeys. St. Louis had the cherry dress.

Woman's Exchange of St. Louis An undated photo of the exchange.

Even as the populations of consigners shifted from genteel ladies down on their luck to new immigrants trying to find a toehold, the women's exchange in St. Louis stayed afloat, in the way that successful retailers do, by understanding its market. The city has an unusually robust country club scene and its members patronize the gift shop and tearoom as avidly as their mothers and grandmothers did. (The shop also attracts orders for children's clothes from people who live far from St. Louis, including Gwyneth Paltrow, according to the general manager, Jessica Wright.) Although the clientele has remained the same, the consignor profile has changed and many of the women (and men) who now make things for the exchange are not hard-up widows but immigrants from Bosnia, Somalia and Ethiopia. "The wonderful thing about the exchanges is how the managers keep thinking of ways to keep them afloat," Ms. Sander said. Soon after Prohibition was repealed, for instance, the New York exchange got busy serving Manhattans to the socialites of the day at the so-called Crinoline Bar. The place attained the status of minor local legend, in part because of a retail strategy that encouraged clients to start the afternoon with a plate of chicken croquettes and a highball and then stick around to shop. The formula is not so very different at the St. Louis exchange, although lamentably it serves no alcohol. Anachronistic the fashions there may be, but the tearoom menu is a record of stopped culinary time. "I always remember the chicken salad sandwich," said Mary Frances Rand, a New Yorker whose St. Louis family once owned the largest shoe manufacturer in the world. "It was very, very sweet and old-fashioned, even back when I made my debut," Ms. Rand said, adding that her debutante year was 1949.

Stephanie S. Cordle for The New York Times The tearoom today. The diners are, from left, Charlene Barlow; her daughter, Elizabeth; and her mother, Mary Ann Reed.

If the tearoom offerings have changed since then, it is not obvious how. A chicken salad sandwich is listed ("White Meat Only") alongside the Euclid Avenue, an open-face sandwich of sliced tomatoes and crisp bacon smothered in Cheddar cheese. There, too, is a layered Lucky 7 Cake and the locally renowned Woman's Exchange Salad Bowl, an imposing "medley" (landslide is more like it) of julienned chicken breast, ham, Swiss cheese, tomato, hard-boiled egg, bacon, scallions and iceberg lettuce, topped with a dressing whose highly guarded secret ingredient would appear to be mayonnaise. And cholesterol, to be truthful, is an unwelcome and alien concept in the proper scheme of things. It is certainly one with little place in the charmingly timeless world of Lucky 7 Cake and piped cotton batiste. Sensible people both within and outside of St. Louis innately understand the appeal of this truth. It is why "friends from all over, sophisticated friends," as Ms. Polk said, call asking her to order them cherry dresses each Easter. "They're so handmade and special," she added, and a certified bargain at $60. "They're so vintage, really, they just never go out."

Copyright by the New York Times 2007